This one is a delight.
Brenda DeVita's production of Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost" at American Players Theatre is the best live stage-play I've seen since the COVID shutdown. The show is sparkling, hilarious, and manages to have every quality you could want out of the pedantic yet heartfelt treasures of the Bard's early comedy.
The King of Navarre (Nate Burger) has invited his friends and comrades-in-arms (Marcus Truchinski, Jamal James, Ronald Roman-Melendez) to study with him for three-years'-time, and in that space to have no truck nor consort with woman-kind. No sooner is such a hubristic vow proclaimed but four young women of France, including its Princess (Phoebe Gonzalez) and her three besties (Melisa Pereyra, Samantha Newcomb, Jennifer Vosters) arrive on flimsy geo-political business and turn the boys heads away from their studies and attendant vows.
"Love's Labour's Lost" is what might have occurred had James Joyce written a blank-verse rom-com: the simple plot is married to extreme verbal pyrotechnics, as a romantic battle-of-the-sexes ensues which brings all the characters' powers of rhyme and reason to bear in its trenches, as love blossoms in the geographically dubious kingdom of Navarre. Rather than a detailed picaresque, we are instead treated to a more nebulous, emotional odyssey, wherein the characters embark on a journey of growing-up via falling in love, as youthful callousness eventually gives way to the emotional intelligence of adulthood. That journey is rich and tangible in DeVita's first Shakespearean outing as a director, and in no way nebulous at all.
No member of the four-brides-for-four-brothers octet is a slouch. Truchinski blends cad and sentiment to create a hilariously rakish Berowne. Pereyra as Rosaline brings her customary fathomless reservoir of feeling to the proto-heroine. Seeing Burger let loose and be goofy is a joy, and Vosters turns the potentially anonymous Katharine into a memorably ribald creation. The passion and love the cast feels for the play and this telling of its story is palpable.
Particularly with its comedic character parts, discussing the full ensemble of productions of LLL can often feel like taking your life in your hands, as the jokes are so intellectually dense as to sometimes feel impenetrable. But the broader cast of roles such as Holofernes the tutor (James Ridge), Sir Nathaniel the curate (David Daniel), and the servant Costard (Jeb Burris) render their archaic humor sparklingly clear and serve it up with tasteful physical business. Triney Sandoval as the Spanish academic Don Armado is a revelation: Sandoval displays indomitable spirit as the lovelorn windbag, whose rhetorical flights of bombast belie the soul of a classical warrior-poet. Hopefully Sandoval remains a regular on the APT stages. Both in LLL and as Claudius in Hamlet he is nothing less than excellent.
Minus a few unwise excisions from Berowne's lengthy Act 4 speech on the nature of love, DeVita's production has few flaws (though, to my mind, a curtain call is no place for foolery). On opening night, a presumably COVID-based shuffling of the cast resulted in a few understudies venturing onto the boards, including a very assured Kailey Azure Green as Moth, and Nancy Rodriguez filling in for Sarah Day as a gender-swapped Boyet. Rodriguez fared well on opening, though did go onstage with script-in-hand, a concrete reminder that many theaters don't begin paying their understudies until the tech process, and by opening night, many understudies will likely not have had one single rehearsal. Fortunately the show could go on with the aid of such able performers, and nothing was lessened from the overall enchanting experience DeVita has helmed up the hill in Spring Green.
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